5 ms·

> These days it's a client server network. Clients do not need persistent network-wide identity, and only need addresses as and when they communicate with serve

> These days it's a client server network. Clients do not need persistent network-wide identity, and only need addresses as and when they communicate with servers. Servers do not need persistent identity either these days, as the identity of a server is a name-based distinguisher rather than an address-based identifier. This is not the internet I've been sold in my youth, and this statement makes me sad and angry.

privateSFacct 8y ago
Marketers or whatever your business is who depend on users having a persistent network wide identity are scammy. Many people who want at least a small CHANCE at privacy are happy with this situation (rotating IP addresses). Names are resolved through DNS, including load balancer endpoints where many names can share one IP.
- chongli 8y ago
  Privacy is not the same as anonymity. I would like to have a network-wide identity that I can use to authenticate and communicate with my friends and family. This is not the same thing as allowing marketers to track me.
  - rauhl 8y ago
    That sounds awesome, but if it’s network-wide, then marketers (who are also in the network) can also use it. Even if it’s some sort of cryptographically-secure bitstring, all it would take is for you or one of your contacts to leak it once. I don’t think it’s possible to have a persistent, global, private identifier: they seem mutually-exclusive.
erikb 8y ago
Why does it make you sad and angry? It sounds quite reasonable to me. I'm especially happy that we went for human readable names rather than wierd letter/number combinations. Also nobody seems to know when to use these [] brackets around the addresses, and they are even hard to type for people who don't use the US keyboard layout. Last but not least NAT is not just a IP-range splitter but also a security feature. I literally don't see a single thing to be sad about. Angry is even a little harder and honestly a little surprising.
- Uh7seidu 8y ago
  The end-to-end principle where any node on the internet can talk to any other one. This allows anyone to start a service and services (and people) talk to each other without intermediaries. It levels the playing field. Losing that concentrates power and takes options from individuals.
  - pixl97 8y ago
    Yep. CG-NAT puts all the power on your ISP. You want VOIP, sorry your double nat'ed connection messes up about half the time, you better by telephone service with us instead.
  - erikb 8y ago
    How so? It's just a way of representation. The power is still with the ISPs, backbone providers and governments. Power would only flow to the end user if the communication technology itself would enable him direct 1:1 communication to everybody else. E.g. if everybody uses IPv6 China can still block you when you are located in their network. Not a single grain more power to you.
- phyzome 8y ago
  Perhaps you don't remember the days when every computer on the internet was an equal peer. To be honest, I don't quite remember it either; I only caught the very tail end. But time was you could run a website off your home computer, or your own email server. Now you have to go pay money and hand over trust to one of the huge hosting providers, and the internet is a sort-of-bipartite graph with two classes of citizens: The home clients, and the corporate servers.
  - Uh7seidu 8y ago
    Even multiplayer games were played by directly connecting to game servers that could be operated by anyone, no company-hosted clouds that will shut down after a few years.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
tenebrisalietum 8y ago
> and this statement makes me sad and angry Your MAC and/or IP address should not identify you, and never should have been used as an identifier. It's the identity of a communication endpoint. If the OSI model is about making the core of the network stupid and fast, which has proven benefits of scalability and/or extensibility, then identity/authentication is not the network layer's job and never was. If a protocol assumes all hosts on a subnet are trustworthy (ARP/DHCP for example), it's an upper-level protocol design failure, not really having to do with transport (TCP/UDP)/network (IP) layers.
- tormeh 8y ago
  We need some kind of DNS-style federated service that can map the identity (MAC address?) of a non-stationary device to its IP address.
  - tenebrisalietum 8y ago
    There's an elaborate protocol framework that does this for cellular data, I don't know much about it. There is also SCTP.

privateSFacct 8y ago

Marketers or whatever your business is who depend on users having a persistent network wide identity are scammy. Many people who want at least a small CHANCE at privacy are happy with this situation (rotating IP addresses). Names are resolved through DNS, including load balancer endpoints where many names can share one IP.

chongli 8y ago
Privacy is not the same as anonymity. I would like to have a network-wide identity that I can use to authenticate and communicate with my friends and family. This is not the same thing as allowing marketers to track me.
- rauhl 8y ago
  That sounds awesome, but if it’s network-wide, then marketers (who are also in the network) can also use it. Even if it’s some sort of cryptographically-secure bitstring, all it would take is for you or one of your contacts to leak it once. I don’t think it’s possible to have a persistent, global, private identifier: they seem mutually-exclusive.

erikb 8y ago

Why does it make you sad and angry? It sounds quite reasonable to me. I'm especially happy that we went for human readable names rather than wierd letter/number combinations. Also nobody seems to know when to use these [] brackets around the addresses, and they are even hard to type for people who don't use the US keyboard layout. Last but not least NAT is not just a IP-range splitter but also a security feature. I literally don't see a single thing to be sad about. Angry is even a little harder and honestly a little surprising.

Uh7seidu 8y ago
The end-to-end principle where any node on the internet can talk to any other one. This allows anyone to start a service and services (and people) talk to each other without intermediaries. It levels the playing field. Losing that concentrates power and takes options from individuals.
- pixl97 8y ago
  Yep. CG-NAT puts all the power on your ISP. You want VOIP, sorry your double nat'ed connection messes up about half the time, you better by telephone service with us instead.
- erikb 8y ago
  How so? It's just a way of representation. The power is still with the ISPs, backbone providers and governments. Power would only flow to the end user if the communication technology itself would enable him direct 1:1 communication to everybody else. E.g. if everybody uses IPv6 China can still block you when you are located in their network. Not a single grain more power to you.
phyzome 8y ago
Perhaps you don't remember the days when every computer on the internet was an equal peer. To be honest, I don't quite remember it either; I only caught the very tail end. But time was you could run a website off your home computer, or your own email server. Now you have to go pay money and hand over trust to one of the huge hosting providers, and the internet is a sort-of-bipartite graph with two classes of citizens: The home clients, and the corporate servers.
- Uh7seidu 8y ago
  Even multiplayer games were played by directly connecting to game servers that could be operated by anyone, no company-hosted clouds that will shut down after a few years.
- beaconstudios 8y ago

tenebrisalietum 8y ago

> and this statement makes me sad and angry Your MAC and/or IP address should not identify you, and never should have been used as an identifier. It's the identity of a communication endpoint. If the OSI model is about making the core of the network stupid and fast, which has proven benefits of scalability and/or extensibility, then identity/authentication is not the network layer's job and never was. If a protocol assumes all hosts on a subnet are trustworthy (ARP/DHCP for example), it's an upper-level protocol design failure, not really having to do with transport (TCP/UDP)/network (IP) layers.

tormeh 8y ago
We need some kind of DNS-style federated service that can map the identity (MAC address?) of a non-stationary device to its IP address.
- tenebrisalietum 8y ago
  There's an elaborate protocol framework that does this for cellular data, I don't know much about it. There is also SCTP.